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The Bosque Programming Language

microsoft.com

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Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#111

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

augustk wrote: post #106
pmontra wrote: post #27

A random thought about the code samples. What do we gain from having to write point instead of other languages' point.y = value ? I believe that syntax should be designed to make things simple for developers, not for the designers of languages or for compilers.

"Choosing the equal sign to denote assignment is one notoriously bad example that goes back to Fortran in 1957 and has been copied blindly by armies of language designers since. This bad idea overthrows a century-old tradition to let = denote a comparison for equality, a predicate that is either true or false. But Fortran made this symbol mean assignment, the enforcing of equality. In this case, the operands are on u…

Equals is a verb AND a adjective though. So I disagree it's notoriously bad to use it as assignment. This is a situation solved entirely with = (make these equals) and == (are these equals?).

>Thus, x = y does not mean the same thing as y = x.

Unless it does, or should.

The specfic argument you're arguing here is on that is just a simple syntax. You don't like = for assignment, but I do. You like = for comparison, but I like ==... To be fair === is dumb.

You're arguing that point<~(y=value) makes sense, and I'm still not seeing it.

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#112

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

pmontra wrote: post #27

A random thought about the code samples. What do we gain from having to write point instead of other languages' point.y = value ? I believe that syntax should be designed to make things simple for developers, not for the designers of languages or for compilers.

This is a bulk record update, according to what I can find in the docs. It's an atomic operation -- meaning, if instead of updating one field, you updated thirty fields, all would appear to take place as one operation.

Obviously someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#113

Post by [deleted] »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #83
velcrovan wrote: post #79

Please consider using a license other than MIT. MIT assumes all contributors work for a single institution, and doesn't protect licensees from later patent infringement claims. https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/03/09/Deprecation-Notice... Either Apache 2.0 or Blue Oak Model would be better choices.

I'll add to your comment that Microsoft is a known, patent troll. They can give a business something free under MIT, wait until it makes a fortune, and then sue them for same code in patent courts. License like Apache 2.0 give a copyright and patent license for the code. Makes such scenarios impossible. Whether they'll actually do it or not is an unknown. I'd prefer we default on licenses that nullify the patent risk…

[deleted]

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#114

Post by logicallee »

logicallee wrote: post #59
mrkmarron wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a Spanish word used in the SouthWest US for forest along a river. No particular reason behind the name, just a unique and easily searchable choice.

Oh okay. I thought it might have something to do with Basque: "Basque is a language spoken in the Basque Country, a region that straddles the westernmost Pyrenees in adjacent parts of northern Spain and southwestern France. Linguistically, Basque is unrelated to the other languages of Europe and is a language isolate to any other known living language." I didn't know about the forest meaning at all. (Maybe a subconsc…

I'll spell it out (for the downvoter): "is a language isolate to any other known living language" as well as being "a language". It has a very special status between France and Spain. I think anyone who knows about Basque would think of Basque when reading about a computer language named Bosque.

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#115

Post by hardtoreason »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #110

>Bosque programming language is designed for writing code that simple, obvious, and easy to reason about for both humans and machines. var v: List[Int ?] = List@{1, 2, none, 4}; OK! I think it needs some work. AM I supposed to intuitively know what ? and @ mean?

"Easy to reason about" doesn't mean "Doesn't require you to read any documentation."

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#116

Post by Stratoscope »

jasonincanada wrote: post #94
Stratoscope wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's an English error on the very first sentence of the description on the Microsoft site. [emphasis added] The correct usage would be to talk about an error "in" a sentence, not "on" a sentence. Muphry's law get you every time! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

Surely you didn't mean too but the correct tense of "get" on you're sentence would be "gets"

That was to make sure I didnt violate Muphry's law!

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#117

Post by mrkmarron »

trombonechamp wrote: post #65
mrkmarron wrote: post #9

Hi project owner (Mark) here. It is a bit late in the evening for me but I will try to answer any questions when I can. The Bosque language is currently in a very early state with lots of work to do and not ready for practical use. However, I am very excited by the potential in the concepts and wanted to make the project a collaborative endeavor, including both other academics and developer community, from the start.…

Thanks for your work, this looks exciting! I am curious about the following: > Since the semantics and design of the language ensure fully determinized execution of any code there is actually no real need to perform logging within a block of code. So, logging is not available in the compute language. While this may be true for execution, this is not true of data on which the program operates. For example, when proces…

Great question. We take a very maximalist stance here and do not provide any environmental API’s in the Bosque language. Instead all IO, data-time, IP address operations must be part of a host platform – similar to how JavaScript does not provide IO or an event loop in the spec but relies on the browser or Node.js to provide it.

With this model the host can just log/record the environment interactions. The details of this host and integration are an open issue, both research and engineering, but I am very excited by the AMBROSIA architecture (https://github.com/Microsoft/AMBROSIA) by one of my colleagues as a possible design.

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#118

Post by velcrovan »

foldr wrote: post #96
velcrovan wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The link I provided does explain this, under the section “MIT and BSD don’t expect more contributors”, which reads in part: “MIT and BSD terms include a space for a single copyright notice, because they were written for releases from academic institutions that own all the copyrights in their employees’ work. What about other contributors to the project? They hold copyright in their contributions.” Apache 2.0 DOES add…

I don't know what is meant by "space" here. It's a text file. There's nothing to stop someone listing multiple copyright holders in an MIT license. In general, having a long list of copyright holders is bad, because it makes it almost impossible in practice to verify that all of the copyright holders actually consent to release their code under the relevant license.

He’s not implying that the space in the file is somehow limited. He’s pointing towards the same problem you are guesturing at in your second paragraph: that “listing” copyright holders really only makes sense when there is only one of them. Any more than that and you raise the legal question: who exactly has copyright on which parts?

When there is more than one copyright holder, you absolutely need language to address that in the license. MIT license has no such language. Apache 2.0 addresses it by requiring CLAs, per-file copyright and attribution notices, etc. Blue Oak addresses it by using terms that start with "Each contributor".

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#119

Post by mrkmarron »

thomasfortes wrote: post #38
mrkmarron wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current purpose is explore language design choices and their impact on their general utility for programmers and enabling automated developer tools (like verifiers and compilers). The hope is to use Bosque as a proof of concept for various ideas. Some examples of better than existing languages are included as case studies in section 5 of the technical report: -Automatically finding (ideally) any runtime error and…

> -Verifying that a SemVer update is safe or flagging where it will change the behavior of your code. Isn't that similar to what Elm does?

My understanding it Elm checks for signature changes such as adding a parameter to a function. We would like to do more and actually compare the actual behavior of the code before/after the change as well.

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#120

Post by mrkmarron »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #78

Typed strings look really nice, something I tend to wish every language had eventually - though I'm not sure why you'd limit them to Strings and not allow them for all types? I really like the Logarithm example shown in the Dotty docs for instance: https://dotty.epfl.ch/docs/reference/other-new-features/opaq...

There were some discussions for a more general system -- e.g. Int[Seconds] would be a typed int indicating the contents represented seconds.

We needed to think more about all of these usecases and how things worked so we decided to start with just strings as the most useful. It is great to see you had the same idea though and would definitely like to revisit this in the future.

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